How I learned to love reading
Social media | Subtext | Hardy Boys | It takes a village
It’s kind of weird to say that I’m trying to get better at social media. These days, with how toxic and net-negative it’s been proven to be in terms of the overall happiness of one’s life, you’d think the mission would be to do it less or not at all. And yeah, that’s solid advice if you punch a clock at a regular job and have nothing to promote or no audience to engage. But for those of us who MUST engage, whose lives depend on understanding the zeitgeist in at least some small way, the best we can hope for is to exercise intentionality when engaging with social media.
So that’s me.
Most of my recent focus with healthy social media engagement has been on some of the new Twitter clones. Ever since Elon Musk and his chud army co-opted the old hellsite, a few new platforms have rolled out to entice the fleeing audience into their ecosystems. The two leaders that have emerged in the space are BlueSky and Threads. Both are in the business of claiming they’re “just like the old days of Twitter that you remember so well.” But through a combination of UX design, feed algorithm, and the type of user that each site attracts, both platforms are rapidly evolving into unique community spaces that emphasize specific modes of communication.
Engagement bait
Threads is a creation of Meta—the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, in case you have a life—and it’s sort of a Frankenstein’s monster of the Meta ecosystem. While it has the old Twitter flavor as its base recipe, the platform integrates seamlessly with your Instagram and Facebook accounts, enticing that kind of user to also throw a bit of content that way. As a result, Threads has a tendency to favor (and drown in) engagement bait: posts that ask open-ended or easily-googleable questions, “hot takes” that are colder than last week’s chili, or simply posts that are designed to cause such a strong emotional reaction that you have to reply or repost.
(Sorry if you feel I’m talking down to you by defining engagement bait. My mom reads this newsletter and she cannot be bothered to be as online as you and me.)
Let a thousand dumb takes bloom
The specific kind of engagement bait that tends to hook me is the pop culture nontroversy. Such hits from this category include: whether it’s more correct to pronounce the H in herb (Brits and Americans will never agree on this), and which use of the term “out of pocket” came first (most people think it’s “wild/crazy/taboo” but corporate Americans think it’s “unavailable”). Since I’m a writer in LA working to break into Hollywood, it once fed me an endless discussion about whether or not it’s okay to approach Christopher Nolan in a Whole Foods to pitch him your movie script (of course it’s not, and anyway everyone knows he shops at the Gelson’s on Franklin next to UCB).
The nontroversy-du-jour that hooked me last week was taking place on the literary side of Threads. I’m not sure if it was a study that came out or if someone just made a claim and everybody decided it felt true enough to uncritically take it as a fact. Either way, it sparked a multi-day conversation that roped in authors, child psychologists, teachers, armchair critics, everyone. The statement?
“Boys don’t read anymore, and it’s because Young Adult literature isn’t written with young boys in mind.”
Yeesh.
Subtext is everything
It’s easy to see that posts like these are designed in a lab to sow outrage and discord, since that’s what inspires that oh-so-lucrative engagement. I tend to get a whiff of cultural discrimination, too, which is what usually spurs my emotional response. I really, really, REALLY hate to see people painting others with a broad brush as part of an agenda to win folks over to their little bigotry club. The claim that “boys don’t read because Young Adult literature is for girls now” implies that the tiny corner of pop literature that favors girls is somehow unfair or exclusionary, when A) boys can read and relate to books with female protagonists just as much as anyone else can, and B) literally most of the world is designed around boys, especially literature, so your attempt to stir up anger about this little piece being less designed around them makes me look at you sideways.
Whenever these cultural nontroversies pop up, there are folks who chime in hoping to be reasonable. They want to place the blame on some invisible cultural force that’s out of any one person’s control and that the individual is helpless to push back against. The prevailing wisdom is that things suck because of nuanced, society-level threats to common sense. Often enough, people on my side of social media want to blame everything on capitalism. That’s a rhetorical goal I can support, but let’s not forget that every system is made up of human beings, and sometimes that system can be circumvented in your own life if you’re lucky enough to muster up the courage.
How to get the young boy in your life to read
Speaking as a former young boy, it took me a long, long time to adopt a love of reading. If I’d been left to my own devices, I may never have even tried. The reason I came to love reading is because my family wanted me to love it. Each of them—my mom, my dad, my grandfather, my aunts and uncles—took time out of their busy schedules of keeping me alive to make sure I had something to live for.
Before I could read, my dad would read comic books to me. On nights when he couldn’t, he had recorded himself reading to me so I could listen on my Fisher Price cassette player and “read along.” When I got a little older and could read on my own, my mystery-loving mom introduced me to the Hardy Boys mysteries, and once I was hooked on those they were suddenly always on the shelves at my aunts’ and uncles’ houses when we’d go over to visit. Multiple relatives bought me Great Illustrated Classics, which were these chapbook editions of the Western literary canon that had an illustration on every other page. The first chapter book I ever finished was the GIC version of Robinson Crusoe, and I was so dang proud to have finished it that I bragged to everyone I met that I’d read Robinson Crusoe.
My grandfather—to this day one of the most caring and intelligent men I’ve ever known—would engage me in conversation about the books I read and ask me questions that made me think critically about them. He had a book of old Batman comics from the 30s to the 70s that he let me read when I came over to his house, and I’d sit on his staircase and devour those old stories over and over and over again. After he died, that book made its way to my bookshelf. It’s one of my most prized possessions.
And all these amazing interventions don’t even include the army of teachers and librarians and friends’ parents that pointed me in the direction of King Arthur, Robin Hood, Narnia, Bradbury, Asimov, and more.
You can be the change you want to see in the world
When I got older, I discovered that my dad was severely dyslexic, and that he himself couldn’t read until he was in the seventh grade. By the time I came along, he was reading everything from Adam Smith to automotive manuals to Louis L’Amour dime novels. When I asked him how he was able to learn to do this, he said it was my grandfather who sat with him and read him comics, just like my dad would do for me.
Reading wasn’t something that happened because the literature industry created these opportunities for me to read. It happened because the people in my life modeled this behavior for me and patiently encouraged me to fall in love. It’s a habit that was passed down to me from my community.
All this is to say that you shouldn’t automatically believe the world when it tells you its ills are out of your control. Every single one of those Great Illustrated Classics is still in print, as are the Hardy Boys and Narnia and sci-fi classics for every taste. And y’know what? Give these “HoW cOmE bOyS dOn’T rEaD YA” yahoos the middle finger by giving them the Hunger Games, and see if they care whether Katniss is a girl or not. These books and many more are still available—for free—with a library card.
They say it takes a village. So let’s be good neighbors.
Interlude 2
If all I had in this world was a mobile phone and a strong connection,
At least I’d be able to make the time for you.
This is so perfect. Not a fan of “Threads” clicked it once and that was enough.
Everything written here shows the love of reading and writing you have developed over the years and the history behind it. So proud of you! ❤️